New York City’s transfer high schools getting new admissions rules, extra oversight

New York City is beefing up oversight of its alternative high schools, issuing new admissions policies in an effort to make sure off-track students aren’t turned away.

The new rules apply to the city’s 52 transfer schools, which work to quickly catch up students who have dropped out or fallen behind at traditional high schools. Transfer schools admit students directly and typically require an in-person interview to enroll — though some have also required reading tests, letters of recommendation, or a “probationary” period.

A new set of policies quietly issued this spring appear designed to curtail some of those practices. Transfer schools, which enrolled about 13,000 students last year, will not be allowed to test students before they’re admitted, look at attendance or suspension records, and may not admit students for a probationary period, city officials confirmed.

Transfer school leaders have said that some screening mechanisms are essential to ensure students — most of whom have become disengaged with school at some point — are committed to giving school another try before they enroll. But the new policies suggest the education department is also concerned about giving schools too much autonomy to choose among some of the city’s most vulnerable students.

“The goal is to make the process more transparent, easier, and effective for students and families, and to ensure better tracking and accountability within the process,” education department spokesman Will Mantell wrote in an email. Transfer schools will also have to submit more data to the city on which students are rejected or admitted, Mantell said.

City officials said transfer schools have not been allowed to use reading tests, attendance records, and a handful of other criteria in admissions decisions. But last year’s transfer school directory, individual school websites, and interviews with transfer school leaders indicate that some violate those rules or don’t make clear how records or test results will be used.

The schools are also getting new oversight. A new “coordinator of enrollment” will report to Paul Rotondo, the superintendent responsible for transfer schools. He is also now empowered to place students directly into those schools, specifically when a student has been denied admission to three transfer schools. (Officials stressed that all placement decisions will be made in consultation with schools.)

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The city could not immediately say how many students have been denied admission three times.

Rotondo, who previously served as a transfer school principal, said the new policies are not designed to limit transfer schools’ ability to make decisions at the school level.

“From the moment [a student] enters the school building, there’s that human touch, that interview, where the school is looking for the student to be reflective and give a hard look at what got in the way in prior years,” Rotondo said.

Michael Rothman is the executive director of Eskolta, a nonprofit that works with about 20 transfer schools, and a former education department official. He said the policy appeared to be an effort to address “the frustration of what seems like a black box” of transfer school admissions, while preserving schools’ ability to interview students.

“There’s a perception when you’re on the outside of it that [transfer schools are] just looking for students who can graduate,” Rothman said. “But it’s much more that we’re looking for students who can reengage.”

The new policies came a few months before city officials announced plans to eliminate the “limited unscreened” admissions method for high schools, which give preference to students who attend an open house or citywide high school fair. Still, one-third of the city’s traditional district high schools have screened admissions policies.

Frustrations over principal turnover flare up at IPS School 43

It began with a tame slideshow presentation about hiring a new principal at School 43. But the Wednesday night meeting soon spiraled into a venting session — as parents and teachers pleaded with Indianapolis Public Schools to send in more staff.

Bakari Posey, the principal of School 43, departed for another job last week in the latest upheaval at the school, which is also known as James Whitcomb Riley. The assistant principal, Endia Ellison, has taken over in an interim capacity, as the district searches for a new leader for the school, which has faced significant turnover in recent years.

“This school needs help,” said Natasha Milam, who has three children at School 43, which serves about 450 students in prekindergarten to eighth-grade. “We need you all to listen. And we need you all to hear us.”

Milam, who volunteers at the school, said that because the building does not have enough staff to handle behavior problems, students are suspended far too often — meaning students are at home doing chores or getting into trouble, instead of in class learning.

Many in the neighborhood had hoped Posey, who is from the community, would be able to turn the school around after the previous two school leaders left their posts just months into the job. But under Posey’s leadership, the school continued to struggle on state tests, with just 7 percent of students passing both the math and English exams last year.

Posey also disputed the picture of School 43 as a campus in crisis. He said this school year, there hasn’t been “turmoil in the school in regards to student behavior,” suspensions were down, and the campus has been “very calm.” (Suspension numbers could not immediately be verified.) He also said that Indianapolis Public Schools provided “great support” to school staff.

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Nonetheless, parents and teachers’ at the meeting Wednesday said the school has serious problems.

Ryesha Jackson, a 4th-grade teacher who has been at the school a little over a year, said there are not enough staff to help with student discipline problems. That makes it hard for educators to teach, she said.

“We have fights almost every day,” Jackson said. “I guess my question is, ‘What are we doing right now to support teachers?’”

School 43 is a neighborhood school, on the north side of the district. More than 75 percent of students there are black, and almost 70 percent are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price meals — about the district average.

Indianapolis Public Schools interim Superintendent Aleesia Johnson said district and school leaders would work together to develop a plan to address the urgent problems at School 43.

“But what I can’t give you right now is the plan for that help,” she said. “That takes time and coordination with the school staff.”

The district is gathering input about what school community members are looking for in a principal before posting a listing, officials said. Finalists will be interviewed by committees of parents, community members, and school and district staff. The goal is to name a new principal by April.

Also at Wednesday’s meeting was a small contingent from the IPS Community Coalition, a group that is often critical of the Indianapolis Public Schools administration, particularly the district’s partnerships with charter schools.

Michele Lorbieski, a resident from the north side who ran unsuccessfully for the Indianapolis Public Board with the support of the coalition last year, said the district cannot just rely on the next principal to fix the school.

“What I’d hoped to hear tonight was what the school district was doing to put things in place to stop this revolving door of principals,” she said.

District officials did not directly address why turnover has been so high among principals at School 43. But Brynn Kardash, a district official who recently began working with the school, said that the central office is doing more to support it this year.

School 43 was added this year to the transformation zone — an effort to help troubled schools that includes dedicated support and regular visits from a team at the central office, said Kardash, the district’s executive director of schools for the zone. Educators in the zone get additional training, extra planning time, and help analyzing student data, she said.

“The goal is to really support Ms. Ellison in work that she’s doing,” Kardash said, “which then leads to, hopefully, teachers feeling that support in the classroom.”

This personalized learning program was supposed to boost math scores. It didn’t, new study finds

A program that Bill Gates once called “the future of math” didn’t improve state test scores at schools that adopted it, according to a new study.

The research examines Teach to One, a “personalized learning” program used in schools across 11 states and which has drawn support from a number of major funders, including the Gates Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings. (Gates and CZI are also funders of Chalkbeat.)

At five schools in Elizabeth, New Jersey, students who used Teach to One didn’t improve any faster than similar students who didn’t use the program, even after three years. The results underscore the limited evidence for claims that such technology programs can dramatically improve student learning, even as they have become magnets for philanthropic dollars.

“The original aspirations, that Teach to One programs were going to have huge positive effects on math scores — we can rule that out with these studies,” said Jonah Rockoff, a Columbia professor who studied an earlier iteration of the program.

Teach to One says its approach is designed to help students steadily learn math skills, regardless of how unprepared or advanced they are. Students spend time on a computer as well as with a teacher and working in small groups. Students receive individualized schedules each day based on their progress, and a computer program adapts the curriculum to students’ strengths and weaknesses in the form of a “playlist.”

New Classrooms, the organization behind Teach To One, suggests that the Elizabeth results aren’t the full story.

It points to a separate analysis released this week that looks at a broader group of schools — 14, from several districts — that used the program. That study shows Teach to One students making above-average gains on a test known as the MAP, which is taken on a computer with questions changing as students answer correctly or incorrectly.

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New Classrooms co-founder Joel Rose suggested in a statement that those computer-adaptive tests capture something that state tests can miss: students’ progress.

“What seems to be emerging is a real tension in math between approaches focused on long-term academic growth and state accountability systems,” he said.

Rockoff said there might be something to New Classroom’s argument that the study using adaptive test is better able to showcase students’ gains. “If [students] are at a grade four level but they’re in grade six, teaching them grade four material is going to hurt them on the state test,” he said.

But the author of the second study, Jesse Margolis, and a number of other researchers who spoke to Chalkbeat note that it cannot show whether Teach to One caused any of the students’ gains, though — a major limitation.

“While this study cannot establish causality, it is encouraging,” Margolis wrote. (The New Jersey study is better able to establish cause and effect, but it also has limitations and does not rely on random assignment.)

The New Jersey study isn’t the first to show that Teach to One didn’t improve test scores: so did Rockoff’s 2015 report on three New York City middle schools that looked at both state and MAP tests.

One possible explanation is that Teach to One is helpful to students in some places but not others. Margolis said his study examined the same five Elizabeth schools as the Columbia study and also found minimal gains there, but that schools elsewhere seemed to see larger improvements.

Researcher John Pane of RAND, a leader in studying personalized learning, says the results are important to understanding a field with limited research to date.

“Because we have so little evidence on personalized learning,” he said, “every data point can be helpful for us to start triangulating and piecing together what works and what doesn’t work.”